I’m deeply immersed in writing a memoir about some really painful stuff right now, and it’s testing my skills because this is actually my own memoir. The pain of telling this type of story is why people hire me to do it as a ghostwriter. People want their stories told, they want to be heard and understood, but going over all that old bullshit you endured that you’d kind of rather forget about —its painful. You ask yourself why you’re doing this, and the only answer is: I’m a writer. I have to put it on paper. Somehow it will make more sense when it’s on paper. Telling the story is different from living the story. Telling it, you can reveal your perspective which people might not know, or you can reveal other perspectives that have been overlooked. Or you can show people the funny side of tragedy or the tragic side of real life. It’s like how they say “history is written by the victors.” You are the victor. You get to write the history and thus lay claim to the truth. We all have the right to put our perspective on paper, even if nobody’s going to ever use it as a textbook. Your truth is yours and if you feel its valuable, you write it.
The most painful part of writing traumatic memoir
For my clients, the biggest pain in doing this type of work is right in the beginning, when they do the interviews and tell the stories, and then again, all the way at the end of the project when they go over the whole manuscript. They often freak out because the story is there now—on paper for the world to see. Some clients are elated; others, deeply depressed. I’m never sure exactly why, but I’ll leave that to the psychologists out there.
When I work with clients telling incredibly painful stories, I have to get the story out of them, but I don’t tell the story in a way that it’s incredibly painful to read, because nobody would want to read that. Its important to note that when they tell painful stories, clients sometimes have a bit of a revenge focus—they want to blame certain people for what they did. I, however, am not a psychiatrist but a book writer, and I know nobody will want to read a book all about who was to blame for your problems. So, I ignore aspects of the interview that aren’t conducive to a good book. A good memoir is about your transformation against all odds, not about who is to blame for your pain. Another thing it’s important to ignore in a painful memoir is too much emphasis on descriptions of feelings. Yeah. I know. But remember, a memoir isn’t about your pain but how that pain transformed you.
How I Use Ghostwriting to Transform Feelings into Actions in a Story
Even though authors mostly talk about their feelings in interviews, I don’t focus on the author’s feelings when I write. If you do, first of all, the book reads like your diary, not something meant to entertain others. Typically when people write their own memoir, they do talk about feelings way too much. But that’s just how first drafts go. Then when you edit, what you do is use those feelings as clues to remember the actions in the story. Completely change it to a story about actions, you could even write it as a list of actions in order, highlighting the causes and the effects of those actions: this happened, which lead to that decision, with the following outcome, etc. If you can find an entertaining storytelling style (dramatic, thrilling, comedic, dry humor, dark humor, scientific, sentimental, or whatever) and you pair that with the plot points of a story about actions and the results of actions, you’ve basically got a memoir, now, without cracking open the feelings egg all over the page. And yet, you want readers to know your pain. Listen: don’t worry. It’s obvious.
When people see the awful things you had to live with, they’ll know your feelings. You don’t have to delve into it and get all descriptive about something that’s going to give you nightmares, because feelings are universal. Most adults have experienced pain, fear, love, insecurity, self doubt, pride, envy, greed, apathy, regret, mania, depression, and everything in between, so everyone knows how they would feel if the things that happened to you happened to them.